86 | SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN | SPECIAL EDITION | WINTER 2022This mechanism can break down after severe trauma, how-
ever. When this happens, nightmares arise in which the fearful
memory is replayed realistically; the creative recombining of
memory elements is thwarted. The pandemic’s ultimate impact
on a person’s dreams will vary with whether or how severely
they are traumatized and how resilient they are.
A second class of theories—also still speculative—may explain
social distancing themes, which permeated IDreamofCovid.com
reports. Emotions in these dreams range from surprise to dis-
comfort to stress to nightmarish horror. Tweets located by the
@CovidDreams account illustrate how incompatible dream sce-
narios are with social distancing—so incompatible that they
often trigger a rare moment of self-awareness and awakening:
“ We were celebrating something by having a party. And I woke
myself up because something wasn’t right because we’re social
distancing and not supposed to be having parties. ”
These theories focus on dreaming’s social simulation function.
The view that dreaming is a neural simulation of reality, analo-
gous to virtual reality, is now widely accepted, and the notion
that the simulation of social life is an essential biological function
is emerging. In 2000 Anne Germain, now CEO of sleep medicine
start-up Noctem, and I proposed that images of characters inter-
acting with the self in dreams could be basic to how dreaming
evolved, reflecting attachment relationships essential to the sur-
vival of prehistoric groups. The strong interpersonal bonds reit-
erated during dreaming contribute to stronger group structures
that help to organize defenses against predators and cooperation
in problem-solving. Such dreams would still have adaptive value
today because family and group cohesion remain essential to
health and survival. It may be the case that an individual’s con-
cerns about other people are fine-tuned while they are in the sim-
ulated presence of those people. Important social relationships
and conflicts are portrayed realistically during dreaming.
Other investigators, such as cognitive neuroscientist Antti
Revonsuo of the University of Turku in Finland and the Universi-
ty of Skövde in Sweden, have since proposed additional social
functions for dreaming: facilitating social perception (Who is
around me?), social mind reading (What are they thinking?) and
the practice of social bonding skills. Another theory advanced by
psychology professor Mark Blagrove of Swansea University in
Wales further postulates that by sharing dreams, people enhance
empathy toward others. The range of dream functions is likely to
keep expanding as we learn more about the brain circuits under-
lying social cognition and the roles REM sleep plays in memory
for emotional stimuli, human faces and reactions to social exclu-
sion. Because social distancing is, in effect, an experiment in
social isolation at a level never before seen—and is likely antago-
nistic to human evolution—a clash with deep-rooted dream
mechanisms should be evident on a massive scale. And because
social distancing disrupts normal relationships so profoundly—
causing many of us to spend excessive time with some people and
no time with others—social simulations in dreams may play a
crucial role in helping families, groups, even societies deal with
sudden, widespread social adaptation.
THE ECHO CHAMBER OF SOCIAL MEDIA
there is one basiC question about pandemic dreams that we
would like to nail down: whether the dream surge was amplified
by the media. It is quite possible that early posts of a few dreamswere circulated widely online, feeding a narrative of pandemic
dreams that went viral, influencing people to recall their dreams,
notice COVID themes and share them. This narrative may have
even induced people to dream more about the pandemic.
Evidence suggests that mainstream media reporting probably
did not trigger the surge but may have temporarily amplified its
scope. The Bulkeley and Solomonova-Robillard polls corroborat-
ed a clear groundswell in dream tweeting during March 2020,
before the first media stories about such dreams appeared; indeed,
the earliest stories cited various tweet threads as their sources.
Once stories emerged, more surges in dream reporting
through early April 2020 were detected by IDreamofCovid.com
and @CovidDreams. The format of most early stories almost
guaranteed amplification: they typically described some salient
dream themes observed in a survey and provided a link directing
readers to participate in the same survey. In addition, 56 percent
of articles during the first week of stories featured interviews
with the same Harvard dream scientist, which may have influ-
enced readers to dream about themes repeated by her.
The surge began to decline steadily in late April 2020, as did
the number of mainstream media articles, suggesting that any
echo-chamber effect had run its course. The final nature of the
surge remains to be seen. Until COVID vaccines or treatments
are fully distributed and with waves of future infections or new
viral variants possible, threats of disease and social distancing
are likely to persist. Might the pandemic have produced a lasting
increase in humanity’s recall of dreams? Could pandemic con-
cerns become permanently woven into dream content? And if so,
will such alterations help or hinder people’s long-term adjust-
ments to our postpandemic futures?
Therapists may need to step in to help certain people. The
survey information considered in this article does not delve
into nightmares in detail. But some health-care workers who
saw relentless suffering later themselves suffered with recur-
rent nightmares. And some patients who endured the ICU for
days or weeks suffered from horrific nightmares during that
time, which may in part have been the result of medications
and sleep deprivation induced by around-the-clock hospital
procedures and interminable monitor noises and alarms. These
survivors will need expert help to regain normal sleep. Thank-
fully, specialized techniques are highly effective.
People who are not traumatized but still a little freaked out
about their COVID dreams also have options. New technologies
such as targeted memory reactivation are providing individuals
with more control over their dream narratives. For example,
learning how to practice lucid dreaming—becoming aware that
you are dreaming—aided by targeted memory reactivation or
other methods could help transform worrisome pandemic
dreams into more pleasant, maybe even useful, dreams. Simply
observing and reporting pandemic dreams seems to positively
impact mental health, as Natália Mota of the Federal University
of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal, Brazil, found in her studies.
Short of therapy, we can give ourselves permission to ease
up and to enjoy banking those surplus hours of sleep. Dreams
can be vexing, but they are also impressionable, malleable and
at times inspirational.Tore Nielsen is a professor of psychiatry at the Université de Montréal and director
of the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory there.